The “private life” of the tune is public soul-searching.

For nearly a decade, the song-yards’ Merrill Garbus has been known for its encouragement, jumping and dancing, as she coaxed sounds from several different instruments and reliable cycle pedals. Although the signature sound of tun-yards is obvious, Garbus is not the person who puts the label on music.

“It’s always the hardest thing,” she said. “I appreciate the fact that I can’t classify the music that I play, because once you do that, you start making assumptions and start closing people.”

On her album Nikki Nack four years, Garbus has been deleted from the most cerebral sci-film – Yards performance something: the name of the band is no longer a stylized mixed uppercase and lowercase letters, and facebook is gone. Instead, she added new music, some of the effects of music in Haiti – and most notably, she knew more about her role as a white woman of music.

I looked at our audience, mostly white people. At about that time, I believed that this was the death of Eric Garner, and we played a program, and we played our song, “the gate,” which was specifically targeted at police violence. I looked out and saw a young black man raising his hands and holding his “don’t take” position. I didn’t see any white hands. I didn’t see the people around me in solidarity with him. The image just burned in my head, and I thought, “there’s something wrong here. What we can do is not happening. How do I do that?” I think I’m the first step is to look at themselves and study these things is how to live on my body, which is the source of the album title, it felt like it related to our era of surveillance paranoia, real concern for privacy, but it is these things in my body the way of life – how could I not to call others, blame others, but really see in my hand.

Whiteness as a “cultural vacuum”

So I don’t know that I’m stealing some concrete stuff, but of course, we found more outrageous cultural appropriations in popular culture. But I think the role of whiteness is cultural vacuum… Because it’s not real. It is now described as a white culture for very political reasons, for economic reasons. As a white man, I began to explore the differences between me and the different cultures, and the sources of this whiteness.